Finally, Saga Of Baby Emily Comes To A Close

January 10, 1996|By TERENCE SHINE and DIANE LADE Staff Writers

After three long years, Stephen and Angel Welsh finally know no one can take their child.

By declining to hear the case of Baby Emily, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the state Supreme Court ruling that she should remain with her adoptive parents. Emily's biological father terminated his parental rights when he financially and emotionally abandoned her mother, the state court ruled.

Tuesday's decision brings an end to the case and a conclusion to the agony for the Welshes, who have cared for Emily since her birth on Aug. 28, 1992.

"It's been the most difficult three years and the most rewarding three years," said Angel Welsh, holding her husband's hand at a West Palm Beach news conference Tuesday afternoon. "From the moment we held Emily in our arms, we felt she was our child."

The Welshes, who live in Plantation, plan to go to Tallahassee this year to support a proposed bill that would give adoptive parents in their situation more legal strength.

Emily, however, will stay home with her new preschool playmates and her favorite toys, out of the spotlight.

"Now that it's over, she deserves the life of a normal child," Stephen Welsh said. "The next time she'll have her picture taken by a newspaper will be when she wins the Nobel Prize."

While Emily is still too young to comprehend that she has been a public figure since birth, her parents say she has recognized herself on the news. "What am I doing on television?" she asked once.

Already, they are reading a book to her on what it means to be adopted and have saved some newspaper clippings.

"When the day comes and she's old enough to ask us what happened, we'll tell her that her birth mother wished more for her than she could give her, and wanted her to be happy," said Stephen Welsh, a theatrical lighting engineer. "We'll tell her that we did what we thought was the right thing to do."

Emily was conceived in 1991, the out-of-wedlock child of Gary Bjorklund of Pompano Beach and Linda Benco of Boca Raton.

Benco later broke off the relationship, when she found out Bjorklund had spent three years in a Minnesota prison for a 1978 rape conviction. She later would say that said Bjorklund verbally and physically abused her.

She decided to put their child up for adoption without telling him. When Bjorklund found out, he decided he wanted the child, igniting a bitter and public legal battle that lasted until Tuesday's decision.

Steven Pesso, Bjorklund's attorney, said his client will never be able to understand what happened. "He feels the child was stolen from him and it was an illegal adoption from the start," Pesso said.

Bjorklund had been encouraged by earlier rulings in his favor and two strong dissenting opinions in the Florida Supreme Court decision. Justices Gerald Kogan and Harry Lee Anstead, writing separate opinions opposing the majority, said the court ignored long-standing parental rights.

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision on Tuesday contrasts sharply with rulings involving Baby Jessica and Baby Richard, nationally publicized cases in which biological families won custody from adoptive parents who had raised the children for years.

"The difference in those cases is the fathers said they had no knowledge of the baby," said Lee Ann Mancini, founder of the South Florida chapter of The DeBoer Committee for Children's Rights.

The Welshes uneasily watched both cases as they made their own way through the courts. Stamped in their memories were the tortured faces of Jan and Roberta DeBoer, of Michigan, as they handed over their adopted daughter Jessica, the child crying hysterically.

"I started having dreams that Emily was alone in her bed and crying, and I couldn't reach her," said Angel Welsh, a musical theater teacher at Walker Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale.

It would easy to view Baby Emily as a victory for adoptive parents, Stephen Welsh said, an evening of the score after Baby Jessica and Baby Richard went to the biological families.

"But we consider it a victory for the birth mother, not a matter of adoptive parents versus biological ones," Steve Welsh said. "What happened was what the birth mother wanted and what was in the best interests of Emily."

The battle between adoptive parents and birth parents will probably resurface in the Florida Legislature this year, however, with two proposed bills. One, sponsored by state Rep. Debby Sanderson, R-Fort Lauderdale, would make it easier for adoptive parents to prove that a biological parent had abandoned their child.

On the other side, Rep. Tom Warner, R-Stuart, will push to strike clauses in state adoption laws that allow termination of parental rights because of abandonment.

The Welshes and other adoptive parents plan to line up with Sanderson. Birth parents, especially biological fathers, no doubt will support Warner.

The Welshes say that when the time is right, they will consider allowing Emily contact with her birth parents.

The Welsh family had no special plans for Tuesday night, just a small gathering of friends in their Plantation home. "For three years, we never knew when the call was going to come, so we couldn't make plans," Angel Welsh said.